Stanford Doesn't Seem to Understand How to College
The only interesting thing about their General Education Requirements
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
Over the weekend, two Stanford professors published an NYT Op-Ed saying that democracy is failing because of a lack of “civics education,” which at Stanford used to be called courses in "Western Civilization.” It's not a good essay.
The piece opens by equating students yelling at teachers to the right using state power to dismantle higher education.1 It then asserts, without evidence, that there's a causal link between changing curricula at elite schools and the collapse of democracy - absolutely missing the carefully-proven fact that this itself is specific, deliberate, partisan attack by a minority of (mostly white) voters.
I was going to write about all the conceptual flaws built into the essay, but Paul Musgrave already did it and did it better.
A few highlights:
[Even if the plan suggested by the Stanford professors worked, there are]: enormously long lead times that courses have from implementation to impact. Let’s say that you’re trying to solve a problem about how policymakers behave by launching a class that targets 20-year-olds. It will take, at a minimum, decades before the people who took your course to become policymakers, and then a decade or more in addition before alumni represent a majority of your target population…
One catches more than a hint that authors… assume that only campuses like Stanford count, which is why they spend so much time on the elimination of core courses at Stanford and its peer schools but comparatively little time trying to assess whether other universities have followed suit. You would not know, for instance, that Texas already requires six credit hours of American government and history—a requirement frequently met, as I understand it, by a course in Texas politics. Nine other states have similar but less extensive requirements.
Last January I wrote about the idea that we can save history as a profession by getting lawmakers to mandate history classes. At the time I liked that this was a solution actually related to a major problem in the field (too few jobs), but added this caution:
On the one hand, the idea of lobbying state governments is innovative, though holding up Texas as a model of historical academic freedom is a curious choice. It's true Texas does require more history and I'd very much like to see analysis of who is teaching it, their job status, and how it's playing out given the theocratic government of that state and its current efforts to censor students.
Moreover, if you look at what's happening at New College Florida right now, Ron DeSantis' merry band of thieves are mandating humanities - more Socrates! more Bible! - and I don't think if they succeed it's going to lead naturally to restoring democracy. Again, the core problem with all of this is that the authors present no evidence that the fall of democracy stems from a loss of classes on “Western Civilization” and that whatever loss - real or imagined - can be repaired by Stanford model required civics classes overrides the whole piece and renders it less than useful.
All of that said, there is one very interesting thing about what Stanford is doing; the university is putting a cap on major credit hours, thus opening up more space for the new general education requirements. The authors write:
At Stanford, since 2021, we once again have a single, common undergraduate requirement. By structuring its curriculum around important topics rather than canonical texts, and by focusing on the cultivation of democratic skills such as listening, reasonableness and humility, we have sought to steer clear of the cultural issues that doomed Western Civ. The new requirement was approved by our faculty senate in May 2020 without a single dissenting vote.
But if you follow through on the link the authors provide, you'll see that things are perhaps not as simple as all that. The article in the Stanford Daily says:
[T]he Faculty Senate passed both the “Future of the Major” proposal, which will require all majors to consist of between 60 and 100 units, and the proposal for a “First-Year Experience,” which will involve a two-course requirement in civic, liberal and global education.... The proposal raised worries among engineering faculty, who expressed concern about how unit limits would affect student skills and preparedness for entering the workplace. Electrical engineering professor Andrea Goldsmith expressed worries about a lighter curriculum leaving students inadequately prepared to work in industry, saying the changes could “turn Stanford Engineering into engineering lite and hurt our reputation.”
Stanford's reputation will, I think, remain just fine. But there's a real problem in how professional degrees just pile on class after required class after required class, walling its students off from the general education, the broader college community, the chance to learn and grow, the chance to change paths and directions. This move by Stanford, in my view, doesn’t go far enough (100 units before general education requirements seems like a lot!), but it's a step in the right direction. More schools need to place harder caps on all majors, pushing students to explore more, to learn more, to focus less on content acquisition and more on developing skills to learn content they don't know is relevant yet!
Because that’s always been the real payoff of a broadly based education - not a specific set of facts, but the skills to learn whatever it is the future requires of you.
It’s been well-documented that the latter actually uses the overly dramatic media coverage of the former as cover for their actions.
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